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Morocco earthquake: Canadian in Marrakech describes scenes of destruction

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Living close to one of Canada’s most earthquake-prone regions, Nelson, B.C. resident Fiona Richards has experienced her share of tremors.

But none prepared her for the magnitude 6.8 quake that struck Morocco late Friday night while she was staying in Marrakech’s Medina quarter during a week-long vacation in the North African country.

“This one was terrifying,” she told CTVNews.ca in an interview over WhatsApp on Saturday. “It was the scariest thing I think any of us have ever been in.”

Outside, in the busy historic district, she said, “the screaming started as soon as the trembling started.”

Richards is visiting Morocco with her husband and two friends from Vancouver. The four were relaxing inside their rented home in the middle of the city’s old quarter when the largest quake to hit Morocco in 120 years struck.

“It was so strong, it was so powerful. It felt like the floor was moving under your feet and you could feel the vibrations just all through your body. And everything was moving and rumbling,” she said. Richards said the shaking went on for what felt like 30 to 40 seconds.

“Occasionally we would look up because I think we just we were expecting the walls to come down. And we’ve got cracks in the walls today, but we feel safe.”

Others weren’t so lucky. Officials in Morocco said the quake – which toppled buildings and walls from villages in the country’s Atlas Mountains to the ancient city of Marrakech – has killed at least 1,305 people and injured 1,832. Deaths are concentrated mostly in Marrakech and five provinces near the quake’s epicentre, Morocco’s Interior Ministry reported Saturday morning, and the death toll is expected to climb as rescue and recovery efforts in heavily damaged areas continue.

A photo by Canadian Fiona Richards shows the damage in Marrakech’s Medina quarter following a deadly earthquake in Morocco on Friday night. (Fiona Richards photo)

Among the injured, the ministry wrote, 721 were in critical condition.

Across Marrakech, including in the crowded Medina, where Richards is staying, the force of the quake drove families into the streets, fearful their homes would collapse. Many, like the family next door to Richards’ rental home, spent Friday night outside.

“They stayed outside all night long and crying and screaming,” she said. “We went outside and we invited them in because our place was fine and tried to console them. This morning they’re still out there. They were too scared to go back into the building.”

Surveying the damage outside several hours after the quake, Richards said some streets were littered with rubble from collapsed buildings and smashed clay from pottery stands, while on others, people went about their business as usual among buildings that looked untouched by the damage.

Richards said she doesn’t know how the natural disaster will affect the remainder of her travel plans, but that she’s grateful her group still has access to shelter, electricity and running water.

“We have some plans, but I don’t know if those plans will still be valid,” she said.

“It’s a trip to take in the sights, sounds and smells of Marrakech, and now it’s taken on a different meaning.”

REACTION IN CANADA

In a tweet on Saturday morning, Federal Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly said Canada’s thoughts are with all of those affected by the disaster and urged Canadians in Morocco to register with Global Affairs Canada.

In a statement Satuday evening, Global Affairs Canada said it has been contact with 30 Canadian citizens in Morocco and is not aware of any Canadians killed or injured in the quake. There are 4,763 Canadians listed in the Registration of Canadians Abroad lliving in Morocco.

“Canadian consular officials stand ready to provide consular assistance to Canadian citizens if needed,” Global Affairs said.

As for Canadians with direct ties to Morocco, about 100,000 residents of Canada claimed Moroccan heritage in the 2021 census.

In Quebec, where more than 81,000 residents identified as Moroccan as of 2021, local and provincial leaders used social media to show solidarity with the Moroccan community.

“My thoughts are with the Moroccan people,” Premier Francois Legault wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “Marrakech, Rabat, Casablanca, Agadir, Essaouira, all magnificent cities that I have visited.”

“The images coming in from Morocco, after the country was hit by an earthquake, are heartbreaking,” Mayor Valerie Plante tweeted on Friday night. “Tonight, an entire community has been shaken. My thoughts are with Montrealers of Moroccan origin. Our hearts go out to you.”

In an interview with The Canadian Press, Abdelhaq Sari, a Moroccan Montreal city councillor, verified that members of his family in the capital city of Rabat are safe, but said other members of the community have struggled to get information from rural areas of the country.

“What I know about the tragedy is in the urban places … we can have communication, we can have like information,” he told The Canadian Press. “However when we go to the rural places it’s very hard.”

Several aid organizations have launched emergency response funds to help those affected by the quake, including Oxfam Canada, while others say they are monitoring the situation in Morocco.

– With files from the Canadian Press and the Associated Press 

 

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STD epidemic slows as new syphilis and gonorrhea cases fall in US

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NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. syphilis epidemic slowed dramatically last year, gonorrhea cases fell and chlamydia cases remained below prepandemic levels, according to federal data released Tuesday.

The numbers represented some good news about sexually transmitted diseases, which experienced some alarming increases in past years due to declining condom use, inadequate sex education, and reduced testing and treatment when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

Last year, cases of the most infectious stages of syphilis fell 10% from the year before — the first substantial decline in more than two decades. Gonorrhea cases dropped 7%, marking a second straight year of decline and bringing the number below what it was in 2019.

“I’m encouraged, and it’s been a long time since I felt that way” about the nation’s epidemic of sexually transmitted infections, said the CDC’s Dr. Jonathan Mermin. “Something is working.”

More than 2.4 million cases of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia were diagnosed and reported last year — 1.6 million cases of chlamydia, 600,000 of gonorrhea, and more than 209,000 of syphilis.

Syphilis is a particular concern. For centuries, it was a common but feared infection that could deform the body and end in death. New cases plummeted in the U.S. starting in the 1940s when infection-fighting antibiotics became widely available, and they trended down for a half century after that. By 2002, however, cases began rising again, with men who have sex with other men being disproportionately affected.

The new report found cases of syphilis in their early, most infectious stages dropped 13% among gay and bisexual men. It was the first such drop since the agency began reporting data for that group in the mid-2000s.

However, there was a 12% increase in the rate of cases of unknown- or later-stage syphilis — a reflection of people infected years ago.

Cases of syphilis in newborns, passed on from infected mothers, also rose. There were nearly 4,000 cases, including 279 stillbirths and infant deaths.

“This means pregnant women are not being tested often enough,” said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of medicine at the University of Southern California.

What caused some of the STD trends to improve? Several experts say one contributor is the growing use of an antibiotic as a “morning-after pill.” Studies have shown that taking doxycycline within 72 hours of unprotected sex cuts the risk of developing syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia.

In June, the CDC started recommending doxycycline as a morning-after pill, specifically for gay and bisexual men and transgender women who recently had an STD diagnosis. But health departments and organizations in some cities had been giving the pills to people for a couple years.

Some experts believe that the 2022 mpox outbreak — which mainly hit gay and bisexual men — may have had a lingering effect on sexual behavior in 2023, or at least on people’s willingness to get tested when strange sores appeared.

Another factor may have been an increase in the number of health workers testing people for infections, doing contact tracing and connecting people to treatment. Congress gave $1.2 billion to expand the workforce over five years, including $600 million to states, cities and territories that get STD prevention funding from CDC.

Last year had the “most activity with that funding throughout the U.S.,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors.

However, Congress ended the funds early as a part of last year’s debt ceiling deal, cutting off $400 million. Some people already have lost their jobs, said a spokeswoman for Harvey’s organization.

Still, Harvey said he had reasons for optimism, including the growing use of doxycycline and a push for at-home STD test kits.

Also, there are reasons to think the next presidential administration could get behind STD prevention. In 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced a campaign to “eliminate” the U.S. HIV epidemic by 2030. (Federal health officials later clarified that the actual goal was a huge reduction in new infections — fewer than 3,000 a year.)

There were nearly 32,000 new HIV infections in 2022, the CDC estimates. But a boost in public health funding for HIV could also also help bring down other sexually transmitted infections, experts said.

“When the government puts in resources, puts in money, we see declines in STDs,” Klausner said.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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World’s largest active volcano Mauna Loa showed telltale warning signs before erupting in 2022

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists can’t know precisely when a volcano is about to erupt, but they can sometimes pick up telltale signs.

That happened two years ago with the world’s largest active volcano. About two months before Mauna Loa spewed rivers of glowing orange molten lava, geologists detected small earthquakes nearby and other signs, and they warned residents on Hawaii‘s Big Island.

Now a study of the volcano’s lava confirms their timeline for when the molten rock below was on the move.

“Volcanoes are tricky because we don’t get to watch directly what’s happening inside – we have to look for other signs,” said Erik Klemetti Gonzalez, a volcano expert at Denison University, who was not involved in the study.

Upswelling ground and increased earthquake activity near the volcano resulted from magma rising from lower levels of Earth’s crust to fill chambers beneath the volcano, said Kendra Lynn, a research geologist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and co-author of a new study in Nature Communications.

When pressure was high enough, the magma broke through brittle surface rock and became lava – and the eruption began in late November 2022. Later, researchers collected samples of volcanic rock for analysis.

The chemical makeup of certain crystals within the lava indicated that around 70 days before the eruption, large quantities of molten rock had moved from around 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) to 3 miles (5 kilometers) under the summit to a mile (2 kilometers) or less beneath, the study found. This matched the timeline the geologists had observed with other signs.

The last time Mauna Loa erupted was in 1984. Most of the U.S. volcanoes that scientists consider to be active are found in Hawaii, Alaska and the West Coast.

Worldwide, around 585 volcanoes are considered active.

Scientists can’t predict eruptions, but they can make a “forecast,” said Ben Andrews, who heads the global volcano program at the Smithsonian Institution and who was not involved in the study.

Andrews compared volcano forecasts to weather forecasts – informed “probabilities” that an event will occur. And better data about the past behavior of specific volcanos can help researchers finetune forecasts of future activity, experts say.

(asterisk)We can look for similar patterns in the future and expect that there’s a higher probability of conditions for an eruption happening,” said Klemetti Gonzalez.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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Waymo’s robotaxis now open to anyone who wants a driverless ride in Los Angeles

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Waymo on Tuesday opened its robotaxi service to anyone who wants a ride around Los Angeles, marking another milestone in the evolution of self-driving car technology since the company began as a secret project at Google 15 years ago.

The expansion comes eight months after Waymo began offering rides in Los Angeles to a limited group of passengers chosen from a waiting list that had ballooned to more than 300,000 people. Now, anyone with the Waymo One smartphone app will be able to request a ride around an 80-square-mile (129-square-kilometer) territory spanning the second largest U.S. city.

After Waymo received approval from California regulators to charge for rides 15 months ago, the company initially chose to launch its operations in San Francisco before offering a limited service in Los Angeles.

Before deciding to compete against conventional ride-hailing pioneers Uber and Lyft in California, Waymo unleashed its robotaxis in Phoenix in 2020 and has been steadily extending the reach of its service in that Arizona city ever since.

Driverless rides are proving to be more than just a novelty. Waymo says it now transports more than 50,000 weekly passengers in its robotaxis, a volume of business numbers that helped the company recently raise $5.6 billion from its corporate parent Alphabet and a list of other investors that included venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz and financial management firm T. Rowe Price.

“Our service has matured quickly and our riders are embracing the many benefits of fully autonomous driving,” Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in a blog post.

Despite its inroads, Waymo is still believed to be losing money. Although Alphabet doesn’t disclose Waymo’s financial results, the robotaxi is a major part of an “Other Bets” division that had suffered an operating loss of $3.3 billion through the first nine months of this year, down from a setback of $4.2 billion at the same time last year.

But Waymo has come a long way since Google began working on self-driving cars in 2009 as part of project “Chauffeur.” Since its 2016 spinoff from Google, Waymo has established itself as the clear leader in a robotaxi industry that’s getting more congested.

Electric auto pioneer Tesla is aiming to launch a rival “Cybercab” service by 2026, although its CEO Elon Musk said he hopes the company can get the required regulatory clearances to operate in Texas and California by next year.

Tesla’s projected timeline for competing against Waymo has been met with skepticism because Musk has made unfulfilled promises about the company’s self-driving car technology for nearly a decade.

Meanwhile, Waymo’s robotaxis have driven more than 20 million fully autonomous miles and provided more than 2 million rides to passengers without encountering a serious accident that resulted in its operations being sidelined.

That safety record is a stark contrast to one of its early rivals, Cruise, a robotaxi service owned by General Motors. Cruise’s California license was suspended last year after one of its driverless cars in San Francisco dragged a jaywalking pedestrian who had been struck by a different car driven by a human.

Cruise is now trying to rebound by joining forces with Uber to make some of its services available next year in U.S. cities that still haven’t been announced. But Waymo also has forged a similar alliance with Uber to dispatch its robotaxi in Atlanta and Austin, Texas next year.

Another robotaxi service, Amazon’s Zoox, is hoping to begin offering driverless rides to the general public in Las Vegas at some point next year before also launching in San Francisco.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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